


Ddiod Imi

by de_Clare



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Genre: 19th Century, Alternate Universe - 19th Century, M/M, Magical Realism, Newport Rising 1839, Other, Rebekah Riots, Riots, Socialism, Trans, Trans Character, Wales, Welsh Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-25 14:00:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12037380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: Imprisoned and awaiting execution during the 1839 Newport Rising, two Welshmen comfort each other with lullabies and tales of Wonderland.





	Ddiod Imi

Break the tollhouse gate! --”Rebekah--let your children possess the gate of those who  
oppress us!”

Mine owners slink into their pits, and the English priest who preaches obedient slaves hides in a pond.—Twenty thousand cascade as the black mountain of coal slurry that devoured Aberfan--the Republic of Social Justice is at hand!

Soldiers rank on rank, phalanx of eager rifles--

\--Unanimous sigh and fall, tumbling down down the hollow.

Who thought they’d shoot with such delirious abandon?  
\-----

In the subjugated silence, two sullen prisoners skulked in opposite corners of the coal-blackened gaol, as if the worse punishment were shared space with social difference.

“Pwy dych chi’n?” the first addressed the newcomer, clear eyes burning under a cloth cap. From his rattling cough, he’d been stirring molten ore in the ironworks since he could peep over the crucible rim.

“No Cum-raeg,” spat the other, haughtily. A half-drowned scholar with long, fragile fingers, who looked more at home in a sanitorium than a revolution. Still, there’s spirit-- he was shod of two pistols when they dragged him in.

“And they call you educated,” the ironworker scoffed, patting his pockets for phantom fags.

Ignoring him, the scholar paced. “Yes, and a fine waste that was. It’s great to fill your head with liberal ideas, but try to implement them and they shoot at you.”

Doffing his cap, the ironworker scratched his smoke-stained hair. “You think you’re the first to conscript poor folk for the revolution? When I was a boy, I drenched an apron in cow’s blood with the strikers--we raised the red flag for freedom. Then the English hanged an innocent boy like a side of veal.”

The scholar massaged his lily throat, as if loosening the noose.

“But with your dosh,” the ironsmith continued, “maybe all your hide will suffer is a tongue-lashing. They’ve even given you a posh cell. No murderers here, just drunkards and sodomites.”

Unconvinced, the scholar inquired with cruel, twisted lips, “And what are you?”

They ironsmith’s gaze raked him, ear to foot, like a rabbit hanging from a butcher’s hook. “I’m Glyn,” laugh fragmented to crackling cough. “And don’t worry, I’m chaste as a dead dingo’s donger tonight. They round up the easy pickings whenever the students establish a new republic. Makes the law look like it’s doing its job.” Glyn offered his flask, which the scholar drank avariciously.

“Tastes like--cream sherry--single malt whisky--bitter brewed in a barrel with a dead fox,” and heartily sipped more. Courage quickened, he offered “And my Christian name is George.”

The ironsmith grinned like a cat--if cats grinned, that is, as George settled shoulder-to-shoulder. Sensing the scholar brooding over a traitor’s death, Glyn said:

“On nights like this, my gran--God rest her soul--told us stories. Every Sunday, we’d, belt throat-sore Methodist hymns for three hours, and the minister preached fierce about the evils of drink and buggery--wouldn’t you know, those are the only two comforts in the Valleys. After, my gran gathered the whole village in the kitchen of her two-room mining cottage. It would be pissing rain outside, but you’d see the fire on the horizon from the ironworks. Gran would light a cigar, drink her cream sherry, and say--

“Gan fy mam mi glwais chwedel—which is: I heard my mother tell a tale”--

“In a county called Wonderland, which is very different from Wales, because animals could talk--but not so different because they’d usually talk down on ya--there was a poor chimney sweep named Bill, who happened to be a lizard--

One sultry day, the officious White Rabbit said, “Sirrah, extrude this monster from my chimney.” Now, lizards have the same reservation about monsters as you or me, but the rabbit was the queen’s herald, so Bill obeyed with an, “at your service, guv’nor.”

Bill doffed his cotton shirt and buffed it up the shaft--and that monster gave him such a kick with her boot-blacked heel that he shot into the sky. Higher and higher, past the tittering treetops, and a pigeon clucking about serpents, and he’d be nought but lizard soup on impact. But suddenly a petit fours inscribed with a neat, pink “Eat Me” buzzed past on sugar, gossamer wings. With one flick of his clever tongue, he plucked that sweetie from the sky and ate it like prayer. Bill’s neck and legs distended, taffy-like, and he thought, “Cor, the bearded Lizard Jehovah ain’t so big” 

Bill grew so large, he sat amongst the stars, who sang: “You may wish upon a star--but you won’t get very far.” Yet still, Bill swelled until the stars sank iron-hot into his scales, and he straddled all that was--which was saddle-shaped, you know--GREAT YESI MAWR!”

Giddy from either drink or martyrdom, the heretofore wilting scholar, tiger-like, pinned Glyn to the dirt, straddling his chest, “So this is the divine design?” 

Handily reversing the pin, Glyn declared from his mount, “It’s a new republic--workers on top!” then kissed George rough, with bitter aniseed breath, planting a scarlet flag in his throat.

\---

Taking no quarter, tearing cotton for no draw and quarter, George canvassed bare throatskin scrubbed clean as Whitsunday and Glyn’s swollen finger joints strummed George’s nub and fissure. Chord of diminished sigh and fall, tumbling down, down...

Earth in his hair and rakishly unlaced breeches, Glyn continued: “Sitting on that saddle was exalting, but so lonely--astride all creation, tapered tail sunk into nought and narrowing nought.”

“A bottle marked “drink me” popped into the ether, so Bill drank and shrank. He dismounted the saddle, waved farewell to the stars, the pigeon, the cracked cucumber frame of the rabbit’s kitchen garden. But he continued to shrink, into a jungle of grass, and down again, with marbles bumping together, and further still until he was all long strings, cords of an upright piano.

At the crux of a spider’s web, the little vibrations of souls miles away shuddered through him--the caterpillar’s mandibles sucking his hookah, a raven, or was it a writing desk?, producing few notes and all flat--in him, of him--tail tip to claws, balls to lungs, every scale singing in million part harmony. In a manner of speaking, he came without fall or end. But coming is just an echo of what you hear in the quiet--”

The furtive night held its breath, and the air hummed, swollen and achingly alive--George wept, “I’m no martyr. I’m weak and scared and apparently a damned sodomite.”

Glyn dabbed a finger in George’s tears. “Then maybe you’re not a martyr. Maybe, this one time, God’s calling a sodomite to live.” Gathering George to his chest, between shallow breaths, he sang softly an ancient lullaby--

“Huna blentyn, ar fy mynwes---Sleep child on my bosom  
Clyd a chynnes, ydyw hon--Mother’s love is under my breast.”

And under that breast, the song coalesced to an embodied tune--the tune--beyond hearing, too often forgotten, yet always on the tip of the tongue. The room exhaled and swelled, earth floor vast as the Brecon Beacons, and strings unbound to any frame quivered with no fall and no end...  
\---

The Chartists’ sentences were commuted from death to transportation, but when the soldiers came, the cell was empty but for a flask inscribed “ddiod imi” or “drink me.”


End file.
